I'm a journalist who's especially interested in the business and politics of wine. My writing and photographs have appeared in print, online, and on the radio for outlets including BBC America, Decanter, The Atlantic, DailyBeast, Worth magazine, Food52.com, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. I have worked for some of the world’s most celebrated chefs, including Thomas Keller, Alice Waters, and Jean-Pierre Vigato. I am also the founder of Harvard Alumni in Wine and Food. I travel the world in search of the generous spirit – and the pure joy! – of true hospitality.

The Italian Kitchen At Risk: Gennaro Esposito Speaks Out

VICO EQUENSE – If you wanted a snapshot of the current trends and forward thinking of Italy’s most innovative chefs, Festa a Vico is the place to go. It’s a signature summer festival, held here last week, that helps kick off the busy season on the Sorrento coast, along the Bay of Naples.

Fest a Vico brings together some 300 chefs from Italy’s best restaurants, each with their own latest product, technique, or bit of news. It’s a four-day, non-stop exchange of ideas, from established chef to promising young chef, and from visiting enthusiast to local professional.

Behind it all is Gennaro Esposito, the multi-starred chef at nearby La Torre del Saracino, who started Festa a Vico with his team a decade ago. You can see the echoes of his personality in the event’s history and programming: spontaneous yet rigorous, hospitable and creative, individually driven yet very concerned with communal success.

Esposito’s is a commanding presence, both physically and popularly, with strong opinions he expresses openly regarding the difficulties – and the opportunities – of the hospitality industry within Italy’s current economic crisis.

Here are three insights from one of Italy’s most articulate culinary spokesmen, on authenticity, the government, and the problem with canned tomatoes.

There is a major difference between the perception of the Italian kitchen outside of Italy, and its perception within Italy. Within Italy are world-class kitchens serving refined, authentic food at the highest levels, yet their model isn’t followed outside of Italy. The best-known Italian restaurant kitchens abroad tend to be very rustic, very popular trattoria-style venues, where the food is very good but not authentic to its indigenous potential.

For Esposito, it’s a question of sourcing products. “The idea is there, but high quality products don’t travel easily,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of poor imitation.”

Unlike fine French kitchens, whose menus are based on widely-available products like foie gras and loup de mer, the foundational ingredients in fine Italian kitchens are often more basic, like bread, broccoli, beans, and anchovies. They are inconsistently available abroad, which causes many restaurants to rely on ingredients that do travel well, such as parmesan cheese, oil, and tomatoes in a can. When chefs working abroad reach for other ingredients, like salumi and cheese and prosciutto, they face barriers of import restrictions that prevent their use.

That yields only a fraction of the fine Italian cuisine that’s possible.

Esposito uses Japanese chefs working in New York as a contrasting example. Less than an hour’s drive from New York, he said, is a very big supermarket where “entering inside is like entering Ginza. Everyone working inside is Japanese, and you find all ingredients you need, so it’s possible to do real Japanese food in New York. That’s what we need also for Italian chefs.”

Rich Idea, Poor Kitchen

“I think we have to work with the government to find and organize a selection of real Italian products outside of Italy,” Esposito said. “Authenticity is a problem.”

He believes that the most important Italian dishes are made with really poor ingredients, but those ingredients have to be something in particular.

I ask him about Eataly and its efforts to bring authentic Italian products to wider markets. He said that “Eataly is a happy place for people who are curious about Italy, and it can be a first step in searching for quality. They do a very good job and carry very good products. But it’s not enough, and just one place cannot change the moment.”

Partly it’s because Eataly is designed for the American taste and the American way to eat, Esposito said. But the bigger difference is between business and culture. “Eataly is a business, and that’s how it’s run. The work of culture is another kind of work.”

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Not only the kitchen, the delicious foods of chefs of Italy face challenges in gaining space in recognized food journals. This is something where the need for creating the exact infrastructure is getting severe. If the right infrastructure is not brought into the place now, the economy would start feeling the impact of it.